Hurricane Katrina left a path of devastation through hydrocarbon recovery facilities in the Gulf of Mexico. As a result, many wells and production platforms were heavily damaged or destroyed. Many of the these facilities were inactive or nominal producers, and accordingly did not merit repair or reactivation after the storm.
Federal law and/or state law prohibits abandonment of wells or production platforms without proper decommissioning. Accordingly, the owners/operators of these facilities are obligated to remove the damaged structures associated with these facilities, and either repair the well for production, or properly plug and abandon (P&A) so that there is no structure above the mud line.
Many such damaged wells have had their casing structure damaged, or tubing in compression due to the structures collapse during the storm. In other instances, the tubing became corkscrewed or otherwise bent due to the compression. Once the string and top have been cut away, the remaining facilities located in water were submerged and inaccessible without equipment which could operate underwater. Therefore, the process of using conventional wellheads in an underwater environment has become cumbersome and expensive to retrofit and install.
Traditionally, a jack-up barge or other specialized vessel would be required to be located on site to latch on to the tubing and pull it out of the hole via wireline or the like for workover. Often, due to obstruction, the vessel is not able to get directly over the tubing to pull it from the well without further bending the pipe.
Further, the tubing may be bent, compressed, or otherwise damaged in the well, and thus cannot be easily lifted from the well. Vessels for tubing recovery are in short supply, and even when they are available, they can be extremely expensive, especially for use in a P&A operation, or a repair operation on a nominally producing well. Further, if the well is at an angle due to collapse or other catastrophic failure (such as pushed over platforms or the like), this further limits the availability of vessels which could handle the operation.